A letter from Nikki Craft to Bare In Mind, dated December 14, 1988, responding to John Kyff’s "Craft Wins — Nudists Lose" and directly correcting the record on the Cape Cod withdrawal. Craft documents that three readers (Marianna Hoppe-Handler, Carl Flick, Nina Silver) had already protested Kyff’s piece before her own letter, with their protests held back editorially until this issue; that Tom Kelley had already published a conciliatory editorial the previous month without contacting her; and that Kyff’s piece was written, in her words, "before he or Baxandall had even read our statement."

The letter also names, for what it states is the first time in the naturist press, the forced removal of Michelle Handler — Craft’s N.O.P.E. co-founder — from the Naturist Leadership Council on a 6–5 vote, after Handler privately criticized Lee Baxandall for publishing a sexualized image of an eighteen-year-old woman. A footnote records that N.O.P.E. resigned from the NLC in protest and that NENA nearly dissolved over the same split. Cross-referenced to split-07 ("Craft Wins — Nudists Lose") and split-08 (Baxandall/Advocate letter). Part of the Nikki Craft Archival Project.

Keywords

Nikki Craft, Bare In Mind, John Kyff, Lee Baxandall, Michelle Handler, Marianna Hoppe-Handler, Carl Flick, Nina Silver, Tom Kelley, Naturist Leadership Council, NLC, NNLC, NOPE, NENA, Cape Cod National Seashore, 1988, primary source, institutional retaliation, radical feminism, feminist activism

Series

Primary Source Documents

License

CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 (Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International)

Creation date

Letter dated December 14, 1988. This documented edition compiled August 9, 2026.

Language

English

plus-circle Add Review

comment

Reviews